A quick trip to Melbourne

Saturday morning saw me up (not too early) to triple check I had everything in my bag and soon on the way to the airport. Thinking about the following day’s race, I was already feeling my excitement rising as inexorably as global sea levels. But this excitement was tempered by a minor dose of uncertainty about how the weekend was going to play out (kind of like Donald Trump’s campaign manager before every weekend).

The uncertainty came from the fact that I was travelling over as part of a larger group of runners who were all running the Melbourne Marathon. Now I have stated in several posts how much I appreciate the Solemates Running Group, but am still fairly new and many of the guys going over I hadn’t even met yet. So I started learning names at the airport with slightly more success than Rod Culleton learning to run a business (sorry again Wendy).

The flight over is shorter and more pleasant than an episode of X-factor. If I had been on the other side of the plane I could have looked out the window when we turned west and should have been able to verify Alan Jones’ assertion that the Great Barrier Reef is in perfect health (because apparently we don’t need to be close enough to see properly to make decisions like this anymore), but instead I just watched something on my iPad and we were soon touching down at terminal four in Melbourne.

​Will had organised a maxitaxi to pick us all up so we piled in and set off towards the city. The ride in had more shenanigans and dodgy comments than… actually no, I was tempted to make another Trump joke here, but I wouldn’t want to even laughingly suggest his comments are normal or acceptable. So I’ll just say we had some laughs in the taxi with Soley the Bear getting plenty of attention. Soon enough we arrived in the CBD and four of the girls got out at their hotel. This left me to continue on the MCG with Will and Kate (not the British Royals- a different Will and Kate), where we registered for the race and I picked up my race number. We also dropped past the tent where we collect our race gifts- a shirt and a gym towel. There were a number of other marquees set up around the concourse, but they were mainly selling shoes and since we had come over without Imelda Marcos we didn’t need to spend long here. This was a good thing as I was starting to develop some kind of pre-emptive chafe just from thinking about too much running (I didn’t know this was possible before today).

We headed to our hotel nearby to see if they were ready for us to check in. We were a little early, but Kate’s room was ready so we dropped our bags there and went looking for lunch. We found a sushi place nearby and were pretty impressed with the price and quality of what was on offer. Seriously with all the talk of ACCC inquiry in petrol pricing in Tasmania, someone should seriously look into the sushi pricing as well. The other girls had settled in at Young and Jackson's so we wandered over to say hi. Seeing just how much of a good time they were having we decided we weren’t quite ready to start celebrating that early so we left quicker than Hanson can make an idiot out of herself talking about the Governor of Tasmania.

Will was pretty keen to scope out the start line for a meeting place for the all-important pre-race group photos, so we headed off for a walk along the Yarra to pick a spot. Once back at the hotel I began laying all my running gear out for the next morning. I thought I had come fairly well prepared, then I looked across the room to where Will looked to be channelling Steven Dank or Walter White. Yeah, as far as running goes, I’m still as low tech as the Coalition’s version of the NBN.

We went down to the pool with Jarrod and Kate for a bit of a swim but didn’t last long. The water was warm enough, but the powerful wind (that I am sure is not in any way connected to climate change) was threatening to pick us up and deposit us in the land of Oz- and bringing a fearsome windchill with it. The debate on whether to move inside lasted about as long as any rational debate (ie one excludingtheACL or our elected representatives) on Marriage Equality and was won as predictably, so we were soon back inside in the spa.

We had a great evening chatting and laughing, with much discussion of the next day’s run. There was some talk of an early night, but Kate decided we needed to go downstairs for a drink at the bar first. Being the only one of us that I knew of to have won an official half marathon event, no one was arguing so we headed down to the nicely furnished bar for a bit. This didn’t bother me too much, as I have actually stopped trying to go to bed too early before a major event since I don’t sleep much anyway. I think it is probably more important to get a couple of good nights’ sleep in the days leading up to the event.

It seems I’m not the only person that doesn’t sleep the night before an event. When I woke up in the morning and checked our messenger groupchat, it was peppered with photos, memes and comments from just about every hour of the night (a surprising number seemed to feature Wendy's hairbrush).

I looked out the window with some trepidation. The forecast from the previous day had not been good. I was worried about the expected 50km/h winds- you don’t want to run the majority of a marathon with the wind pushing against you harder than Tony Abbott pushing against Turnbull’s leadership. It wasn’t quite as fearsome as I was expecting, but it was far from calm either. Couldn’t do anything about it though.​Will and I had hoped to drop our bags at the MCG on the way to the start of the race and thought we had left with plenty of time to achieve this. I could not have been more wrong if I was Barnaby Joyce correcting Hansard after misleading parliament. The line to drop bags off was stretched for over a hundred metres. Luckily for us, Mumma Bear came to the rescue again, dropping our bags in after the start of the race and then rushing back to be ready for her event.​The race itself was amazing and I have written about it in full detail in a separate postso I won’t go back over it.

Mumma Bear arrived with champagne, beer and bananas (which seemed a perfectly logical shopping list) shortly after we got back upstairs and it was picnic time. We started getting texts from Cam, Simon and Elaine who had just arrived at the airport and the memes began in full. We decided to wait until the others got to the hotel before grabbing dinner- this proved longer than expected due to the fact that they went to the wrong hotel (in their defence, why would you assume of the two possible options we would be in the one right next to the MCG?).

We had managed to book three rooms close by on the same floor, but it seemed that mine and Will’s was unanimously decided to be the one we would congregate in, so we settled in for some pizzas and a few wines, hastily shoving all of our gear under the beds- so much for laying out my stuff in preparation for tomorrow. ​

After the race, we hung around on the grass of the MCG for another hour or so, chatting and soaking up the atmosphere. I wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere else. There was an amazing positive feeling amongst the group and my excitement was further enhanced by meeting my friend, Jen, who I hadn’t seen for ten years. Having run the race in new shoes and feeling blisters opening and reopening more often than inquiries into Hilary Clinton’s emails, I was expecting my feet to have taken the kind of catastrophic heat damage usually associated with a Samsung Galaxy 7 phone. Strangely and as inexplicably as the lack of punishment for the Y’All Qaeda terrorists, I seemed to have largely escaped unscathed (well that was what I thought at the time, before being unable to wear shoes for the next fortnight).

Eventually it was time to head back to the hotel for a slow shower before making our way up the road into Richmond for lunch. Well most of us did. Simon who had just finished his first marathon still had a friend on the track and after waiting for a while found out they were struggling. In an act of incredible courage and compassion, the big champion kicked himself back into motion and ran back to find him and finish the race with him. Kudos for that one (not the just the easy Strava kind either), Simon, although I am glad you didn’t have the same problems finding your friend as you did the hotel.

Once we were all ready (I was moving very slowly and held everyone up for a while) we left the communal gathering place formerly known as Will and my room and jammed into the elevator to head off to lunch. We had an unexpected delay when we got to ground floor, when Cam- who had put in an enormous effort to push himself through his first marathon in a pretty quick time- had a sudden drop in blood pressure, falling harder than Bob Day’s reputation and hitting the tiled floor with an audible crack. Thankfully there was no damage to the tiles and after a short period, Cam was ready to keep going.

Lunch itself was a long and boisterous affair at a pub in Richmond. More and more Solemates and people associated with them kept showing up until we were filling a full level of the establishment. We weren’t the only group in the place who had just run the marathon, everywhere you looked you saw people hobbling around gingerly with huge smiles on their faces. It wasn’t quite the same recovery meal you might expect of professional athletes, but the important thing was plenty of good food and drink was consumed.

By late afternoon it was time to limp my way back to the hotel, grab my bags and head for the airport. With many of us on the same flight out, we got the same maxitaxi driver that brought us in and jumped aboard. Despite being used by the budget airlines, Terminal 4 is more modern than the rest of the airport and quite a nice place to wait. I charged the phone at a wall socket as I ploughed through more awesome sushi. It wasn’t that long until our turn to board and this is where you notice the downside of Terminal 4. Without an aerobridge, we had to walk out in the open whilst the lashing rain ripped into us with the ferocity of government MPs attacking Gillian Triggs.

Catching a plane the same day you run a marathon is not something I would recommend, but the flight back to Hobart is pretty quick. Even so, I had stiffened up even further by the time we landed and made my way down the stairs very slowly.

​Despite fatigue, muscle tightness and sore feet, it had been an absolutely amazing weekend. The conversation now is which interstate marathon to go to next.